Focused Hope

For some reason, it seems like "hope" has been a theme for me the last few weeks. This morning, I, along with other pastors, had the chance to meet with the mayor and police chief to talk about how we can best serve our community. We discussed chaplaincy programs and other things, but what I really heard was that there are people in our community without hope. Chief Thomas said that when he has to deliver a death notice, he can tell who are believers because he can see hope in them.

To me, hope is a powerful thing. Hope is what propels us into faith. Hope is this future abstract that, through faith, we make a reality. Someone without a future is called "hopeless". Not "futureless". I wonder how much of an overlap there is between hope and future? I think that many people think that life isn't worth living today if there's no reason to get out of bed tomorrow. If tomorrow is just the same demanding routine, and we have little influence on making it better, why bother?

How can we reclaim hope? I think it's all about focus. It's easy, and sometimes gratifying, to focus on our own little world with all of its problems and frustrations. The call for a follower of Christ is to move beyond, to see life as opportunity rather than obstacle. I think that doing this apart from a community is impossible. The perspective we gain in serving others forces us to look beyond today and into tomorrow's potential. We begin to see the good that God can do, and we can sense it becoming a reality.